A flying visit to CITCON, hosted by IDBS. Managed to get to a couple of interesting sessions before I had to scoot.

I wonder what they *really* want it for?

Worth checking in Project 2025 what this was actually about.

They're literally stealing somebody's business www.cnbc.com/2025/09/25/t...

Heading back from the shops along Colliers Wood High Street. A bus apparently broke down this morning, and it took them hours to find something that could tow it. Meanwhile, police are milling around, and they find two local characters in bad shape. Now, 3 ambulances have turned up. Looks serious.

And now we go over live to 10 Downing Street...

Cloned an OSS repo and inserted 2 dozen unused imports into randomly selected source files. Client team will find out just how good their LLM is at code inspections this afternoon. Place your bets!

Time for me to deploy my expertise from having worked with databases of individuals and their data in the public sector: whatever you might imagine will be happening behind the scenes of a digital ID card, the actual reality of that dataset is going to be an information governance nightmare.

"Keir Starmer says plans for a new digital ID held on people’s phones will be an 'enormous opportunity' for the UK" An 'enormous opportunity' for what? How will this benefit me? Will it make my bills cheaper? Will it reduce the price of rail travel? Will it clean up the sewage in our rivers?

From 2.5 years ago, my tips for coding with GPT-4. In the intervening time, with another 1000+ hours experimenting with "A.I."-assisted coding, I'd probably add some sub-bullets about... www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nG6...

Interesting take on how "Big A.I." already knows that massive-scale models aren't the future, but sunk cost means they *have* to monetize them regardless of whether they actually work. youtu.be/IQvREfKsVXM?...

My school's YouTube channel is mostly sport, music and drama. Which is odd, because it hasn't produced anybody of any real note in those fields since Rik Mayall. And I strongly suspect Rik Mayall happened despite it.

Talking about my book in West Kirby tomorrow - tickets here www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/wir...

I have a Minilogue. Never managed to make it sound this good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYg...

if you dont stop calling us nazis we will have the secret police disappear you to a slave labor camp

May as well just hand all our data to hostile foreign powers and cut out the middleman

One thing that I don't see being mentioned much is how volatile the "A.I." coding tool ecosystem is. It's like trying to wash your clothes in the rapids. Oops, there goes another shirt.

"Let AI do the busywork so you can focus on what matters". Hmmm. I think I may have found *the* use case for "A.I." - helping businesses to identify work that doesn't matter.

PRO TIP: End any debate about software design by asking "And what would the benefit of that be?" There's a 90%+ chance they haven't given it a moment's thought.

I popped a question on LinkedIn about whether .NET LINQ, Java Streams and that sort of declarative thingummyjig can optimise execution after a few runs in the same way e.g., SQL Server does with stored procedures. Most of the responses were about SQL.

To a great degree we’re dealing with the fallout from a generation of men who got lucky once during a specific moment in tech evolution, made to feel as gods, but are all now suffering their mid-life crises having accomplished nothing else of note. These men have made nothing other than money.

"This relates directly to encapsulation. We want the effect of a function to be contained in the same place – in the same class. When it isn’t, we end up having to share internal details with whichever other class is handling that piece of business" codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/09/25/w...

They've lost the 9yos

The richest man on earth owns X. The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok. The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post. See the problem here?

Okay then. That was the season finale of Alien: Earth. I'd park it there if I was them, and make a series just about the eye thing. Possibly a sitcom.

"Applying this rule ... should catch anyone declaring things that are not used in a test, or used by something that’s used in a test – basically, nothing can exist that isn’t in the call stack of a test except a test." codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/t...

Gosh, I wonder who this is designed to appeal to?

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London: "People will be wondering what it is about this Muslim mayor who leads a liberal, multicultural, successful, diverse city. It seems to me that I’m living rent free inside Donald Trump’s head."

@pitest.bsky.social Hi. Quick PIT question. Is there a way to find out if there are any tests that never fail during mutation testing?

Something I hear often from start-ups is that they don't need very skilled devs to begin. Once the £ starts rolling in, they can "upgrade". Here's what usually happens, though. Those first hires set the tone for years to come. A "bish bosh" culture can be very hard to shake.

First it happens slowly, and then all at once.

"Applying this rule ... should catch anyone declaring things that are not used in a test, or used by something that’s used in a test – basically, nothing can exist that isn’t in the call stack of a test except a test." codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/t...

I'm challenging the narrative that "A.I." is a multiplier in the hands of experts. I see it being repeated everywhere, but there's no credible evidence. If anything, an expert sees more problems in the output and spends more time fixing them. "It would have been quicker to write it myself".

We go live to the latest OpenAI funding round www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-yc...

The concept of "flow" for software developers is so often confined to "coding". It's a mistake to believe that code is the thing that's flowing.

US farming and UK fishing should get together and compare notes. Oh, and UK farming, while we're about it.

Trump at the UN: "I look at London where you have a terrible mayor... Now they want to go to Sharia law." This is entirely false. London Mayor Sadiq Khan is politically moderate and has never ever called for Sharia law. This is Islamophobic propaganda and a bigoted attack on Khan.

Sneak peek! Join the C4 model Patreon if you want to be the first to hear about it... 🤔 www.patreon.com/c/c4model

It is possible to cherish the BBC as an institution while also saying that BBC News is failing very badly, day after day, in its duty to inform and that it always fails in a right-wing direction. It desperately needs to recover its integrity

Finishing up my slides on Code Smells for a client's internal dev conference. I've added a slide about Speculative Generality, just in case it comes up.

"Please can you supply us with the following information that you've already given us - at considerable inconvenience to you - in order to remain a vendor?" Place an order and I'll be happy to.

Goddamit. This is what I'm talking about. Countless billions spent harvesting our data, recording our every choice online, finetuning algorithms and training recommendation models, and I still find out that KNOWER are playing in London two weeks *afterwards* www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ9s...

I'm experimenting with trying to articulate the "rules" of TDD declaratively. Instead of "Do X and then do Y", "When X happens, Z should already be true". It's forcing me to look at it differently, having to *really* think about things.

I'm glad Kimmel is coming back. However, "free speech" where you can reverse government-coerced corporate censorship but only if your supporters make stock price influencing noise would be like a healthcare system in which you need a GoFundMe to go viral to afford treatment. ... wait.

“You are an expert software developer who can express ideas clearly and completely.” Fixed it.

"The line between a great developer and a mediocre one increasingly comes down to the ability to express ideas clearly and completely" We can add this to the list of things that were always important in software development that "A.I." stans have only just discovered.

DISNEY: "OK, we are putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. You can resubscribe now." ME: "I unsubscribed because you immorally bowed to fascism. I'm not going to resubscribe because you immorally bowed to finances."

"Investment" in generative "A.I." is starting to look like that £50 Amazon voucher that I sent my Dad on his birthday which he sent my brother on his birthday which he sent my sister on her birthday which she sent me on my birthday. Hey, we all got £50!

A bit of Snarky Puppy to start the evening? www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnWo...

As they hook yet another hyperscale GPU farm up to a 500 megawatt power supply, I can't help thinking that whatever our 20w brains are doing, it isn't that.